Anti-tank mines and improvised explosives are designed to damage or destroy vehicles, including tanks and armored vehicles. Several advances have been made in the development of modern anti-tank mines and improvised explosive devices, increasing the threat these weapons pose to land-fighting forces. The explosives can be hidden anywhere: in potholes, in trash piles, underground, inside of humans and animals. In addition to disguisability, the devices have, over time, become more and more sophisticated with designs enabling them to have more effective explosive payloads, anti-detection and anti-handling features, and more sophisticated fuses.
Many explosive devices are detonated directly underneath or in proximity to armored vehicles. Existing vehicles manufactured with a flat or nearly flat under belly suffer severe damage from such blasts. With flat-bottomed vehicles, the blast effect from an explosive device frequently proves fatal to the vehicle's occupants because of the vertical deflection caused by the blasts. Moreover, sharp angles in the structure of flat-bottomed vehicles such as at the edges of plates result in bending about a localized pivot point during an explosion.
Recognizing these and other problems, manufactures have attempted to develop alternative blast-protection schemes. Many of those alternative schemes have, unfortunately, proven inefficient and unworkable. For example, increasing the thickness of the hull or raising the hull height can improve a vehicle's performance when an explosion occurs. However, these design changes—increasing thickness and raising height—create other problems they reduce a vehicle's mobility and payload and reduce the available stroke for mitigating the black shock which affects occupant survivability.
These are just a few known problems with existing vehicle designs.